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A Derivation of Love

A Derivation of Love is a very short novel that was arguably seventeen years in the making.

In 1993, for my OAC English Writing major project, I wrote a mostly-autobiographical "day-in-the-life-of" short story called (I think) "Of Far Too Many." Clearly, I wasn't a terribly happy adolescent.

In 2001, when I felt it was time to tackle my first novel, I asked a friend if I should write a science fiction novel or a more-typical-for-a-first-novel semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story. He voted for the latter.

Remarkably, I had managed to hold onto an electronic version of "Of Far Too Many," and it became the starting point for the novel. Eventually, a much revised version of that 1993 story became the second chapter.

In 2006, after the long hard push to submit my PhD thesis on time, I suddenly had plenty of time and a brain that was firing on all cylinders. I finished Paris is Dead and pretty much completed A Derivation of Love in a couple of months. Although I had been working on it, off and on, since 2001, I don't recall having gotten very far. I think most of it was written in a couple of months on Waiheke Island in New Zealand.

In 2009, a conversation with a friend -- and a very sharp reader -- convinced me that one simple but important change was needed to finish it. A year later I decided to test Amazon's self-publishing service. It was so easy that the book was "published" before I knew it.

The full text of the novel is available right here. Please let me know what you think.

To starboard, there was only sea: calm and reflective. To port, more of the same.

“How did we get here?” I asked.

“Best not to think about it, mate,” came the cheerful reply.

At the bow of the boat, three men were playing cards, gambling on a game of War. The man who had cheerily replied to my question reached for a mound of poker chips at the center of their makeshift table. Another man collected the cards. Another sipped coffee.

Beyond them, I saw only more sea.

It was hard to think, but my mouth carried on instinctively. “But, wouldn’t it help, help to get us out of here, if we knew how we got here?”

“Don’t worry about it, mate,” replied the cheerful man. He placed a large bet. Each player was dealt a card face down. “Things will take care of themselves. Join the game. There’s a place for you at the table.”

I looked aft instead.

Over the stern of the boat, the sea lay flat, still, and almost endless. At the horizon, directly behind us, dark clouds marked the space between sea a…

He saw her smile — felt it, really — somewhere between him and the raindrops that fell into the puddles beyond the protection of his umbrella. The memory of her smile reminded him that he he had lived, had a history, had been.

He saw her smile and remembered how she would turn her pretty beautiful shining face up into the rain. She would smile, shutting her eyes into anime-tight semicircles, her face glowing from the pleasure of the rain falling on it, and she would coo — in that sweet, hyper-girlish, and soft voice that she used only to express happiness and joy and delight, that voice that was wholly out of tune with her deep and passionate interest in economics — “I love the rain.”

It occurred to him that she might have taught herself to love the rain only to go against the grain, to push back against the herd mentality presumption that the rain is always a signifier of sadness. It was the sort of thing she would have done.